


Everybody Laugh.

by SelkieLost



Series: But Doctor, I am Pagliacci [2]
Category: Watchmen - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 20:08:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,839
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2201412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SelkieLost/pseuds/SelkieLost
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She laughs when he tells her he’s Rorschach.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Laugh.

He doesn’t mean to go see her again, he really doesn’t. Except his back is healing almost supernaturally fast, even with the torn stitches. And she doesn’t try to stop either Walter or Rorschach when she’s done, where a clinic doctor would ship him off to a hospital for ‘observation’. And if the bleeding doesn’t stop soon he’s going to be in some serious trouble. He’s halfway across the city from anyone who can help him, all except for her. Sirens blare in the night, harpies coming to carry him to hell. Already he can hear people running toward him. There’s no way out of the alley for Rorschach, but Walter shuffles away without a second glance. A couple people ask if he’s all right, a cop asks if he needs a lift to the closest shelter. A snarled word is all it takes each time, pulling his coat closer around himself so they can’t see the blood-soaked tourniquet of his scarf wrapped around his stomach, or the belt around his leg. He can’t go to Night Owl, the mother hen is on a warpath trying to get Rorschach to retire like the rest of them, and the Comedian would just laugh at him for being a fucking retard.

Kotsya’s apartment building smells like too many humans living together, like boiled cabbage and unwashed bodies. It takes him an eternity to get up the stairs, and when he’s finally at her door it swings open when he breathes on it. The lock is broken. Two women sit on the couch, Kotsya and another he’s never seen before. The other woman takes one look at him, an angry-looking man covered in street filth framed in the doorway, and levels a gun at him. It’s a fairly big gun, a Magnum .357, and he might be scared if that had been the worst thing pointed at him tonight. Where the fuck had a two-bit gang like that acquired a missile launcher?

Dogmeat squirms out from under the couch so he can properly greet Walter, and Kotsya lays a gentle hand on the other woman’s gun arm. The movement drags like she’s underwater and he realizes that she’s stoned out of her mind.

“He’s…my friend.” It’s hard to tell if the hesitation would have been there if Kotsya spoke like everyone else, if she’s unsure if she actually considers Walter a friend. The other woman seems equally unsure, the gun lowering so slowly Walter wonders if she’s even aware of it.

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I stitched him up. It’s about time for them to come out.” Kotsya says, so quiet Walter barely hears her six feet away.

“You…?” There’s a question in that one word, and an entire story behind it. Walter wonders if he should leave.

“Come in, Silencîo. Come in.” She still doesn’t know his alter-ego’s name. He shuffles awkwardly inside, leaning his hip against the stove. Kotsya has her knees drawn up to her chest, chin resting on them like a child as she studies the floor. The other woman stares at Walter, her eyes raking down his body in an almost tangible way. No one speaks for a few minutes. Blood slides down his leg and he sincerely hopes that he’s not going to start leaving pools of blood trailing after him.

“I can’t take out the stitches if you’re here,” Kotsya says. The other woman jumps at the quiet words, mouth half falling open as she turns to Kotsya. “It’s fine, Moira, just go.” She’s not very tactful.

The other woman, Moira, is the complete opposite of Kotsya. She looks and talks like a business woman, complete with pantsuit and shoulder pads, perfectly groomed and elegant. Kotsya has her hair pulled back in a gnarled ponytail, her fingers worrying at the hem of another baggy T-shirt, nail beds bloody and swollen from picking at hangnails. Loud and quiet, day and night. He wonders if they’re reltated as more blood trickles down his leg and Moira pushes past him in a cloud of hairspray and perfume. The door doesn’t _quite_ slam behind her, but it comes close.

“I’m going to pay for that.” Kotsya half groans, a lighter firing up. She blows smoke out the open window and looks over at him. “It’s a bit early for those stitches to come out, I didn’t even think you’d be back for that.”

Asking for help feels like vomiting, the words forced and painful and acidicly bitter on his tongue. He pulls his coat to the side, showing her the soaked shirt and pant leg. Kotsya curses at the sight of all that blood, spots of it flecking the floor, and tells him to get the tourniquets off. He doesn’t argue, even as blood pumps down his side and out of his leg, to pool in his shoe and around his feet. The white box is under the couch where she’d pushed it last time she’d stitched him back together and now she yanks it out, sucking hard on the lit pipe. Smoke follows her like a cloud as she asks to see the wounds. Walter leans on the stove and pulls up his shirt, a knife wound skating down his ribs to bite deep into the soft flesh of his stomach. The bullet hole in his thigh has her more worried, setting the pipe down so she can hold a flashlight and clean away the caked-on blood around the hole. Then she rocks back on her heels and stands, eyes focused on a point behind him.

“Knife wound’s no problem. A lot of stitches, but no problem. The bullet wound…I think you might’ve barely nicked an artery. You’ll bleed out slow unless it’s stitched shut, but I don’t have anything to knock you out with…”

“Do it,” he grinds out.

“But-“

“Now!”

She flinches away from him, scurries off to her bedroom while he curses his temper and tries to crush the ache out of his leg. She comes back with a sheet of thick plastic and spreads it on the floor.

“Lie down.”

The bullet hole in his thigh shoots pure agony through his brain and he forces himself to ignore it, even as his leg trembles. He can see her eyes catch the slight limp, sees them focus in on it.

“So what happened?”

“Stupid mistake. Got jumped. Didn’t move fast enough.”

Kotsya just grunts as she threads a curved needle with fine silk thread. She cleans away as much blood as she can, cursing softly to her self like it’s a prayer, and then she starts putting him back together.

He comes back to himself as she’s rolling him over. There’s music playing, wordless lounge music from an era neither of them are old enough to have been part of. She’d gotten up at some point and turn on the record player.

“I need to see the exit wound. I may have to try and stitch that one closed.”

The tail of his shirt rides up as he turns, exposing the last two inches of the knife wound on his back. Her hand is cool against the inflamed flesh as she bares the rest of it, her fingers gentle as they touch the knots of catgut. No escape, she’s already seen.

“These are my stitches.”

“Yes.” It’s the truth because there’s no point in lying.

“Did I forget…?” She sounds lost, lost and a little bit scared.

She laughs when he tells her he’s Rorschach. He wouldn’t really mind (a scrawny ginger man who looks like a stiff breeze could knock him over, obviously homeless; knocks on your door and tells you he’s a violent masked vigilante, laughing is to be expected) but she knows him. Knows he’s not crazy (well, at least not in _that_ way), knows he’s not drunk. Then she stops laughing and the silence in her apartment echoes as it tries to fill the space.

Her fingers are gentle as she cleans blood away from the wound in his leg, gentle as she disinfects it and tapes a square of gauze over the hole. She doesn’t say anything other than “This’ll sting a bit” before she starts sewing the gash marking his side.

He wakes up with his head on a pillow and his feet on one of Kotsya’s legs. The other leg has a typewriter on it, one of those lighter new models. Somehow she’d gotten him into new shirt pants, both as baggy as hers, and onto the couch. The typewriter is loud in the silence, _tap-tap-taptaptap-tap_ , and it goes quiet when he struggles to sit up. Stitches pull on his back and side, throbbing in time with his leg and all of the other millions of aches.

“You pulled some stitches in your back, and there are a couple of spots that I squeezed some pus out of, but it’s all fixed now as long as you keep it clean. There’re no stitches in your leg, so try and keep people from knocking into it for a while. Your side is one big stitch at the moment, but they can get taken out in a couple of weeks.”

She doesn’t say that _she’ll_ take them out, doesn’t make it sound like she’s forcing him to come back. Doesn’t try to make him stop fighting, stop doing his job. Instead she just reads him what she’s written. It’s a short story, some weird shit about the end of the world. It’s not really his thing. The point of writing, she says, is to make people cry and laugh. To force them to feel something. She tells him this is how she makes money. She sends in pages and pages of stories and they send her a check. Moira takes the check to cash and a list of what Kotsya needs, paying the landlord on her way back. Sometimes there’s money left over, sometimes there isn’t. Sometimes Moira complains about everything she has to do for her hermited sister and takes the change as payment. That’s been happening more often recently.

People stumble past the door and Kotsya stiffens, fingers tensing into claws over the typewriter’s keys until the hall goes quiet again. It’s only been a week since Rorschach cleaned out the peddlers upstairs, but it seems that new men had already taken their place. One junkie got the wrong address and broke the door in, looking for his next fix. Kotsya had woken to the door slamming against the oven and Dogmeat yelping in terror. Choas reigned. She’d been sober, too terrified to tell the man he was in the wrong room, on the wrong floor. He’d stayed and yelled for a long time, Kotsya getting more and more panicked, and then Moira had showed up. The man had left almost before Moira had fully pulled the gun from her handbag.

Kotsya looks out the window.

“It’s raining. Sleep on the couch.”

He ends up sleeping on that couch more often than either of them had expected.

**Author's Note:**

> As with the rest of this series, all mistakes are mine. Let me know if you find one, please!


End file.
